In a move to beef up its ability to mobilize diverse data sources, Appcelerator has snapped up Singly. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Singly is an API integration management company. Adding its tech to the Appcelerator mix will boost its capabilities for opening data sources to make them readily consumable by mobile apps running on any device.

"APIs are the lifeblood of mobility, giving developers access to the data and services needed to build amazing apps," said Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator. "With Singly's API integration management joined to the Appcelerator product line, customers can much more easily unlock public and enterprise data sources, making available a rich layer of services on which to build transformative native apps that run on any device."

Singly's Singular Promise

Here's some background: Mobile apps require a different programming interface than traditional web applications to access data sources and services. Mobile APIs must deliver payloads optimized for consumption on smaller screens, and must translate traditional interface formats such as XML into modern ones such as JSON. Battery and bandwidth considerations drive the need for rate limiting as well.

Singly works to drive data portability for mobile. The company's DataFabric product normalizes data on behalf of the apps it serves, functioning as an abstraction layer for a large number of APIs, including LinkedIn, Yammer, PayPal, Dropbox, Google Calendar, Facebook, and Twitter.

This abstraction layer also shields developers from having to adjust their apps every time something changes in one of these underlying APIs. Singly provides a palette of pre-built API integrations, and will soon release an SDK for developers. These capabilities, in conjunction with Appcelerator's portfolio of pre-built mobile cloud services, promise to reduce the time, complexity and cost of connecting apps to both public and private services and data sources.

Appcelerator plans to integrate Singly's capabilities across its product line by early 2014. This includes Titanium, the open source development environment adopted by nearly 500,000 mobile developers, and the Appcelerator Platform, which enables companies to build native mobile apps at the speed of web, mobilize any data source, and to drive success with real-time analytics.

Appcelerator Accelerating

Appcelerator was recently named a "visionary" company with the highest placement for vision and execution by Gartner in the Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms. This marks the second consecutive year that Appcelerator has been named to the Visionary Quadrant.

Earlier this month, the company hired Brian Carr as its first Chief Revenue Officer. Carr was most recently the Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Services at Good Technology, and also held executive sales roles at Synopsys, Clarify and Simplex Solutions.

And in July, Appcelerator raised $12.1 million in new capital. The latest funding round was led by EDBI, a Singapore-based global investment firm. The Social Internet Fund also joined as a new investor, along with prior investors Mayfield Fund, Sierra Ventures, Storm Ventures, Relay Ventures, Translink Capital, eBay, and RedHat. This brings the total investment in the company to over $63 million.

"Appcelerator's Singapore based Asia Pacific headquarters positions them perfectly to capitalize on Asia's rapidly growing market for enterprise mobile solutions, while gaining access to EDBI's regional networks," said Swee-Yeok CHU, president & CEO of EDBI. "Their presence is a significant addition to the local enterprise mobility ecosystem, and will strengthen Singapore's capabilities in the development of new mobile and lifecycle management solutions."

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